Hi, I'm Dr. Mike Heiser, Scholar-in-Residence at Faithlife.
And I want to launch into a five-part series today on God as man in the Old
Testament.
Now, this is an idea that we associate with Jesus because we believe in the deity
of Jesus.
We think of God as man being Jesus only, but you'll actually see this in the Old
Testament.
Now, I've dealt with this at length in my book, The Unseen Realm, but there are
enough instances I think we can go through pretty quickly in our series that you'll
be able to see what I'm talking about and be blessed by it.
Probably the most obvious is Genesis 18, where Abraham and Sarah are visited by
three men.
Well, it turns out in Genesis 19, that two of the men are angels.
And the third man is actually the Lord, actually the God of Israel.
Yahweh, the divine name, the special God of Israel.
That is pretty transparent because the language just sort of tells us that.
What isn't so clear are some of the other ones.
Genesis 32, we're all familiar with Jacob wrestling with the angel or wrestling with
the man there in that chapter.
That incident gets referred to in Genesis 48 in a really telling way.
When Jacob is about to die, he blesses Joseph's children.
And he says, in part of his prayer, he says in three stanzas, may the God who
protected me throughout my life, may the God who took care of me,
so on and so forth.
And then the third stanza is, may the angel bless these boys.
And you say, well, what's so interesting and spectacular about that?
The verb bless is singular.
Jacob doesn't say, may they bless these boys.
He says, may he bless these boys.
Well, who's the he?
Is it God or the angel?
The answer is yes.
Again, it's a sort of a cryptic reference to the idea in an Old Testament writer's
mind that this particular angel was God, God in human form.
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
As we proceed through our segments, I'm going to show you more instances where
God appears as a man in the Old Testament.
Hi, I'm Dr. Mike Heiser, scholar in residence at Faithlife.
And this is the second installment of our little series on God as man in the Old
Testament.
One of the more interesting instances of this for me occurs in Exodus 23.
Now, this is after the crossing of the Red Sea.
This is after giving the Ten Commandments at Sinai.
God comes to Moses and says, I'm going to send an angel before you to guide you,
to get you to the promised land.
You need to obey him because he will not pardon your transgressions.
Why?
Because my name is in him.
Now to understand what's going on here, you have to know a little bit about what
Old Testament scholars call the name theology.
The name Hashem in Hebrew is another way of referring to God himself.
Now, if you have maybe a conservative Jewish friend today, they will not say the
divine name, the special name Yahweh for the God of Israel.
They will either say Adonai, Lord, or they will say Hashem, the name.
It's another way of referring to God.
There are verses in the Old Testament that talk about trusting in the name of the
Lord.
Well, you're not trusting.
The Israelites weren't trusting in four consonants.
That's another way of saying I'm trusting in God himself.
And so if we take that back to Exodus 23, what God tells Moses is really
fascinating.
Listen to this angel that I'm sending before you because my name is in him.
I'm in him.
My essence, my presence is in him.
And if we actually look at other passages in the Old Testament about who took the
Israelites to the promised land, some verses say God, some verses say the
angel, some verses say the presence of God.
You say, well, which is it, Mike?
The answer is yes.
It's all of them because they're all different ways of talking about the same
thing.
But in the angel's case, this angel was visible in human form.
He shows up elsewhere as the captain of the Lord's host.
We have God as man in the Old Testament.
What's really fascinating about this one is when you get to the New Testament and
Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane.
In John 17, he thanks God for the name given to him and says, I have kept those
who you've given me by your name because I'm in you and you're in me.
What is he talking about?
He's not saying, boy, Lord, I'm glad that that I was named Jesus.
I could have been named Elvis or something.
That's not what he's saying.
He's saying, I'm glad that I came as a man incarnate.
I have your name inside me because in that case, Jesus of Nazareth is saying the
essence of God himself is embodied within me.
It's very consistent with the Old Testament, but we can miss it in the Old
Testament.
So when you come across the name of the Lord, think about this passage in Exodus
where we again see God as man in the Old Testament.
Hi, I'm Dr. Mike Heiser, Scholar in Residence at Faithlife.
And we're continuing with our series on God as man in the Old Testament.
In our last segment, I alluded briefly to Joshua chapter 5, where Joshua meets the,
quote, commander or captain of the Lord's host.
And we're talking about God as man in the Old Testament.
And this is often a passage people wonder about.
The evidence that this is actually God as man is actually a lot clearer than you
might suppose.
If you read Joshua chapter 5, verses 13 through 15, there's a specific phrase in
the description of the commander of the Lord's host.
He has a drawn sword in his hand.
You say, well, big deal.
Everybody carried swords, didn't they?
Well, yeah, they did.
But the Hebrew behind that phrase occurs in only two other places in the Old
Testament.
One of them is in Numbers 22, 23, when we have Balaam and the donkey,
where it's the angel of the Lord who has a drawn sword in his hand.
The other one is in the incident in Chronicles, where David has sinned by
calling for a census, and the angel of the Lord is sent to destroy.
And he's described specifically as having a drawn sword in his hand.
These are the only three references, those two plus Joshua 5, where that
specific Hebrew phrase occurs in the entire Old Testament.
It's a way the biblical writers telegraphed who they were talking about
there in the book of Joshua.
Now, it's significant because we saw earlier in our second segment,
the idea of the angel leading the people of Israel to the promised land,
the angel in who was the name of God, the very essence of God.
Now, the amazing thing is if you go to the New Testament and you look in Jude,
the tiny book of Jude, Jude verse 7, guess who led the people of Israel out of
Egypt into the promised land?
It says Jesus.
It's a very clear allusion back to the captain of the Lord's host and the angel
in whom was the name.
And we saw in our last segment that Jesus had the name as well, there in his high
priestly prayer in John 17.
So, if you go back to Joshua 5, whenever you read that passage,
I hope that you have all these other ideas sort of floating around in your head and
you can read that passage more intelligently.
It's another instance where God appears in human form in the Old Testament.
I think we can tell by now, our third installment, the purpose for this.
This kind of material is preparing readers, preparing Jews, preparing for
later Christians, Gentiles, anyone who hears the gospel message for the idea of
God coming as a man, as the Messiah.
These Old Testament passages sort of pave the way for that idea so that it just
doesn't come out of thin air all at once when we have Jesus born.
Hi, I'm Dr. Mike Heiser, Scholar-in-Residence at Faithlife.
And we're continuing today with our fourth of five installments on God as man in the
Old Testament.
Now, we're not specifically talking about Jesus being in the Old Testament.
We're talking about the second person of the Trinity as a human being, coming as a
human being, appearing as a human being in the Old Testament.
And that's a precursor to what's going to happen in the Incarnation, in the New
Testament with Jesus.
One of my favorite instances of this in the Old Testament is the story of Samuel,
the little boy Samuel.
Now, this is a story we're all familiar with.
Samuel is living with Eli right there in the tabernacle where the ark is kept.
And what happens?
Samuel's trying to go to sleep.
He lays down and hears a voice that says, Samuel, Samuel.
And he thinks it's Eli because the very first verse of that chapter said,
now catch the wording, the word of the Lord was rare in those days.
Hold on to that thought.
Samuel runs over to Eli and says, what do you want?
Eli says, hey, I didn't call you.
This happens a couple more times.
And it finally dawns on Eli, you know, I think it's the Lord.
The Lord is calling you.
So the next time it happens, say, speak, Lord, for your servant hears.
So Samuel does that.
And sure enough, we read in verse 10 in 1 Samuel 3, the Lord came and stood as he
had before.
So it's the same voice, but now we have a figure standing before Samuel,
an embodied figure.
And Samuel says, speak, Lord, for your servant hears.
And he gives a message to Samuel about Eli that's bad news.
And Samuel, sure enough, tells Eli the truth later on.
But the chapter ends in a really significant way.
It says, after that, everybody from Dan to Beersheba, the whole stretch of the land,
knew that Samuel was ordained as a prophet of the Lord.
Why?
Because the Lord came and appeared.
That's the language of visual appearance.
The Lord came and appeared to him by the word of the Lord.
If you're thinking what I'm thinking, word of the Lord, that's an idea we
associate with John chapter 1.
In the beginning was the word, the word was God, the word was with God,
the word became flesh.
In John 1 14, that idea has deep Old Testament roots.
And this is another example here in 1 Samuel chapter 3 of God coming as a man in
the Old Testament and specifically this time referred to as the word of the Lord.
Hi, I'm Dr. Mike Kaiser, scholar in residence at Faithlife.
And this is the fifth of five installments on God as man in the Old Testament.
For this one, I want to take you back to Genesis 15.
Now, it's a familiar story.
We know that God made a covenant with Abraham.
One of the chapters where this is described is Genesis 15.
And the very first verse is important.
It says, the word of the Lord appeared to Abraham.
And we have the word of the Lord who we sort of met in our last installment.
And again, the idea of an appearance.
In verse 5, it says that the word of the Lord, this figure, that he took Abraham
outside and showed him the stars.
And this is the language of embodiment.
This is a person there.
It's not just a voice in Abraham's head.
It's someone there with him.
Now, we know from Paul later that the gospel was preached to Abraham and the
Lord appeared to Abraham.
But again, the word of the Lord helps us put this into a little bit of a context
for us.
Now, later in the prophets, in Jeremiah chapter 1, we have one that I consider
pretty startling.
Same thing happens.
This is Jeremiah's call to ministry in chapter 1.
And it says, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah.
Now, Jeremiah starts to have a conversation with him.
And he refers to the word of the Lord as Yahweh, as the Lord.
He knows who he's talking to.
And then a few verses later, it says that the Lord, again, this figure, the Lord,
who's also called the word of the Lord, reached out his hand and touched me,
touched my mouth.
Now, that even goes beyond visual embodiment.
It's a tactile experience.
We have God, not only just in human form, but somehow in flesh to touch the prophet.
Again, these are all precursors to what we see in the New Testament.
The idea that God could come as a human being, they had been prepped for that.
Now, the incarnation sort of ups the ante.
The incarnation isn't just visual embodiment.
The incarnation isn't even just tactile embodiment.
The incarnation means that God was actually born as a human being,
born of a woman.
So it's even more spectacular than the Old Testament.
But what you get in the Old Testament prepares the mind of the reader,
prepares them theologically for what is going to come.
This is not a Christian invention.
This is consistent through both testaments of the Bible.
So it's important to realize that biblical theology, again, doesn't change.
You don't get point A and then point B contradicts it.
It's a consistent story, consistent themes, consistent ideas given to us.
And they take on new meanings as the Bible story goes on.